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  • The Fall of the Turkish Model: How The Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism by TugȈal Cihan
  • Şahan Savaş Karataşlı
The Fall of the Turkish Model: How The Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism By TugȈal Cihan Verso Books, 2016. 304 pages, $20.96 paperback.

Adecade ago, Western policymakers were united in their promotion of the "Turkish model." The synthesis of democracy, liberalism, and Islam, proffered by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) government, was seen as a model for the Middle East. Especially since the 2011–2013 Arab Spring revolts and the 2013 Gezi uprising in Turkey, however, Erdoğan's AKP has increasingly been associated with authoritarianism and has been seen as a major source of discontent, crisis, and chaos at home and in the region. What has changed?

In The Fall of the Turkish Model, Cihan Tuğal (2016) presents a theoretically informed comparative-historical analysis of the making and unmaking of the Turkish model. Comparing trajectories of Islamic movements and liberalism in Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, and Iran, the book explains why political actors in the Middle East cannot export the Turkish model as they please and why this model is not sustainable. When this model is implemented, sooner or later, contradictions of neoliberalism undermine democratization, paving the way for nondemocratic and non-liberal regimes. Hence, roots of the authoritarian turn and crisis in Turkey and in the region lie in the successful implementation of neoliberalism in past decades.

Despite its title, the comparative analysis presented in the book goes beyond discussion of "the Turkish model." It explains divergent paths of (neo)liberalization in Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, and Iran, and provides readers with a timely discussion of the reasons and consequences of the post-2008 wave of revolts in the Middle East. Tuğal also makes a major theoretical contribution to the literature by bringing political parties—as well as Antonio Gramsci's concepts of "political society" and "power blocs"—back into the study of social revolutions in general, and of "passive revolutions" in particular.

Like Tuğal's previous book, Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2009), this book extends Gramsci's notion of "passive revolutions." Unlike revolutions that overturn political and economic structures of a society through social and political mobilization from below, "passive revolutions," in Tuğal's usage, "absorb [bottom-up [End Page 1] mobilization] into existing political and economic structures" (p. 23). Recognizing that his previous book underestimated the self-destructive potential of the Turkish passive revolution, in this book TugȈal turns attention to the question of how passive revolutions fail and collapse.

In a nutshell, Tuğal's book argues that in Egypt, Tunisia, and Iran, efforts to replicate the "Turkish model" (i.e., attempts for "passive revolutions") eventually failed because, unlike in Turkey, Islamic political and civil actors did not have a unitary vision about how to regulate their societies. In Gramscian terms, Islamic "political societies" were weak and fragmented. Because of this fragmentation, they failed to produce strong and sustainable coalitions (i.e., "power blocs") that would act according to the interests of the global and national dominant classes, and to absorb social mobilization from below. Consequently, they were not able to take power (e.g., in Tunisia), to transform existing Islamic states in a liberal direction by mobilizing protests in their favor (e.g., in Iran), or to consolidate their temporary rule by countering the opposition and absorbing the potentially subversive Islamic movements into a neoliberal regime (e.g., in Egypt after 2011). Moreover, in contrast to the AKP in Turkey, none of the Islamic groups in these countries had the fortune to interact with relatively democratic state institutions, which was instrumental for the making of the "Turkish model."

Differences in the configuration of the Islamic political societies, in return, shaped the trajectory of liberalism in each country. In Egypt, the fragmented and semi-professionalized nature of Islamic political society after the 1980s—coupled with the organizational weaknesses of Islamic actors embracing (neo) liberalism (i.e., the Muslim Brotherhood)—prevented the spread of liberalization by Islamic actors. Although the Brotherhood temporarily managed...

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